The Deeper Significance of Bush's Slip that We Are Waging a Crusade Against Terror

by James Carroll

Mr. Carroll, a columnist for the Boston Globe, is at work on a television documentary based on his bestselling book, Constantine's Sword. His latest book is Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War.

At the turn of the millennium, the world was braced for terrible things. Most
"rational" worries were tied to an anticipated computer glitch, the
Y2K problem, and even the most scientifically oriented of people seemed temporarily
at the mercy of powerful mythic forces. Imagined hobgoblins leapt from hard drives
directly into nightmares. Airlines canceled flights scheduled for the first day
of the new year, citing fears that the computers for the traffic-control system
would not work. The calendar as such had not previously been a source of dread,
but all at once, time itself held a new danger. As the year 2000 approached, I
bought bottled water and extra cans of tuna fish. I even withdrew a large amount
of cash from the bank. Friends mocked me, then admitted to having done similar
things. There were no dances-of-death or outbreaks of flagellant cults, but a
millennial fever worthy of medieval superstition infected the most secular of
cultures. Of course, the mystical date came and went, the computers did fine,
airplanes flew and the world went back to normal.

Then came September 11, 2001, the millennial catastrophe--just a little late.
Airplanes fell from the sky, thousands died and an entirely new kind of horror
gripped the human imagination. Time, too, played its role, but time as warped
by television, which created a global simultaneity, turning the whole human
race into a witness, as the awful events were endlessly replayed, as if those
bodies leaping from the Twin Towers would never hit the ground. Nightmare in
broad daylight. New York's World Trade Center collapsed not just onto the surrounding
streets but into the hearts of every person with access to CNN. Hundreds of
millions of people instinctively reached out to those they loved, grateful to
be alive. Death had shown itself in a new way. But if a vast throng experienced
the terrible events of 9/11 as one, only one man, the President of the United
States, bore a unique responsibility for finding a way to respond to them.

George W. Bush plumbed the deepest place in himself, looking for a simple expression
of what the assaults of September 11 required. It was his role to lead the nation,
and the very world. The President, at a moment of crisis, defines the communal
response. A few days after the assault, George W. Bush did this. Speaking spontaneously,
without the aid of advisers or speechwriters, he put a word on the new American
purpose that both shaped it and gave it meaning. "This crusade," he
said, "this war on terrorism."

Crusade. I remember a momentary feeling of vertigo at the President's use of
that word, the outrageous ineptitude of it. The vertigo lifted, and what I felt
then was fear, sensing not ineptitude but exactitude. My thoughts went to the
elusive Osama bin Laden, how pleased he must have been, Bush already reading
from his script. I am a Roman Catholic with a feeling for history, and strong
regrets, therefore, over what went wrong in my own tradition once the Crusades
were launched. Contrary to schoolboy romances, Hollywood fantasies and the nostalgia
of royalty, the Crusades were a set of world-historic crimes. I hear the word
with a third ear, alert to its dangers, and I see through its legends to its
warnings. For example, in Iraq "insurgents" have lately shocked the
world by decapitating hostages, turning the most taboo of acts into a military
tactic. But a thousand years ago, Latin crusaders used the severed heads of
Muslim fighters as missiles, catapulting them over the fortified walls of cities
under siege. Taboos fall in total war, whether crusade or jihad.

For George W. Bush, crusade was an offhand reference. But all the more powerfully
for that, it was an accidental probing of unintended but nevertheless real meaning.
That the President used the word inadvertently suggests how it expressed his
exact truth, an unmasking of his most deeply felt purpose. Crusade, he said.
Later, his embarrassed aides suggested that he had meant to use the word only
as a synonym for struggle, but Bush's own syntax belied that. He defined crusade
as war. Even offhandedly, he had said exactly what he meant.

Osama bin Laden was already understood to be trying to spark a "clash
of civilizations" that would set the West against the whole House of Islam.
After 9/11, agitated voices on all sides insisted that no such clash was inevitable.
But crusade was a match for jihad, and such words threatened nothing less than
apocalyptic conflict between irreconcilable cultures. Indeed, the President's
reference flashed through the Arab news media. Its resonance went deeper, even,
than the embarrassed aides expected--and not only among Muslims. After all,
the word refers to a long series of military campaigns, which, taken together,
were the defining event in the shaping of what we call Western civilization.
A coherent set of political, economic, social and even mythological traditions
of the Eurasian continent, from the British Isles to the far side of Arabia,
grew out of the transformations wrought by the Crusades. And it is far from
incidental still, both that those campaigns were conducted by Christians against
Muslims, and that they, too, were attached to the irrationalities of millennial
fever.

If the American President was the person carrying the main burden of shaping
a response to the catastrophe of September 11, his predecessor in such a grave
role, nearly a thousand years earlier, was the Catholic pope. Seeking to overcome
the century-long dislocations of a postmillennial Christendom, he rallied both
its leaders and commoners with a rousing call to holy war. Muslims were the
infidel people who had taken the Holy Land hundreds of years before. Now, that
occupation was defined as an intolerable blasphemy. The Holy Land must be redeemed.
Within months of the pope's call, 100,000 people had "taken the cross"
to reclaim the Holy Land for Christ. As a proportion of the population of Europe,
a comparable movement today would involve more than a million people, dropping
everything to go to war.

In the name of Jesus, and certain of God's blessing, crusaders launched what
might be called "shock and awe" attacks everywhere they went. In Jerusalem
they savagely slaughtered Muslims and Jews alike--practically the whole city.
Eventually, Latin crusaders would turn on Eastern Christians, and then on Christian
heretics, as blood lust outran the initial "holy" impulse. That trail
of violence scars the earth and human memory even to this day--especially in
the places where the crusaders wreaked their havoc. And the mental map of the
Crusades, with Jerusalem at the center of the earth, still defines world politics.
But the main point, in relation to Bush's instinctive response to 9/11, is that
those religious invasions and wars of long ago established a cohesive Western
identity precisely in opposition to Islam, an opposition that survives to this
day.

With the Crusades, the violent theology of the killer God came into its own.
To save the world, in this understanding, God willed the violent death of God's
only beloved son. Here is the relevance of that mental map, for the crusaders
were going to war to rescue the site of the salvific death of Jesus, and they
displayed their devotion to the cross on which Jesus died by wearing it on their
breasts. When Bush's remark was translated into Arabic for broadcast throughout
the Middle East, the word "crusade" was rendered as "war of the
cross."

Before the Crusades, Christian theology had given central emphasis to the resurrection
of Jesus, and to the idea of incarnation itself, but with the war of the cross,
the bloody crucifixion began to dominate the Latin Christian imagination. A
theology narrowly focused on the brutal death of Jesus reinforced the primitive
notion that violence can be a sacred act. The cult of martyrdom, even to the
point of suicidal valor, was institutionalized in the Crusades, and it is not
incidental to the events of 9/11 that a culture of sacred self-destruction took
equally firm hold among Muslims. The suicide-murderers of the World Trade Center,
like the suicide-bombers from the West Bank and Gaza, exploit a perverse link
between the willingness to die for a cause and the willingness to kill for it.
Crusaders, thinking of heaven, honored that link too.

Here is the deeper significance of Bush's inadvertent reference to the Crusades:
Instead of being a last recourse or a necessary evil, violence was established
then as the perfectly appropriate, even chivalrous, first response to what is
wrong in the world. George W. Bush is a Christian for whom this particular theology
lives. While he identified Jesus as his favorite "political philosopher"
when running for President in 2000, the Jesus of this evangelical President
is not the "turn the other cheek" one. Bush's savior is the Jesus
whose cross is wielded as a sword. George W. Bush, having cheerfully accepted
responsibility for the executions of 152 death-row inmates in Texas, had already
shown himself to be entirely at home with divinely sanctioned violence. After
9/11, no wonder it defined his deepest urge.

But sacred violence, once unleashed in 1096, as in 2001, had a momentum of
its own. The urgent purpose of war against the "enemy outside"--what
some today call the "clash of civilizations"--led quickly to the discovery
of an "enemy inside." The crusaders, en route from northwestern Europe
to attack the infidel far away, first fell upon, as they said, "the infidel
near at hand"--Jews. For the first time in Europe, large numbers of Jews
were murdered for being Jews. A crucifixion-obsessed theology saw God as willing
the death of Jesus, but in the bifurcated evangelical imagination, Jews could
be blamed for it, and the offense the crusaders took was mortal.

The same dynamic--war against an enemy outside leading to war against an enemy
inside--can be seen at work today. It is a more complex dynamic now, with immigrant
Muslims and people of Arabic descent coming under heavy pressure in the West.
In Europe, Muslims are routinely demonized. In America, they are "profiled,"
even to the point of being deprived of basic rights. But at the same time, once
again, Jews are targeted. The broad resurgence of anti-Semitism, and the tendency
to scapegoat Israel as the primary source of the new discord, reflect an old
tidal pull. This is true notwithstanding the harsh fact that Ariel Sharon's
government took up the Bush "dead or alive" credo with enthusiasm
and used the "war on terrorism" to fuel self-defeating overreactions
to Palestinian provocations. But some of Israel's critics fall into the old
pattern of measuring Jews against standards to which no one else is held, not
even our President. That the war on terrorism is the context within which violence
in Israel and Jerusalem has intensified should be no surprise. It wasn't "Israel"
then, but conflict over Jerusalem played exactly such a flashpoint role a thousand
years ago.

The Crusades proved to have other destructive dynamics as well. The medieval
war against Islam, having also targeted Europe's Jews, soon enough became a
war against all forms of cultural and religious dissent, a war against heresy.
As it hadn't been in hundreds of years, doctrine now became rigidly defined
in the Latin West, and those who did not affirm dominant interpretations --
Cathars, Albigensians, Eastern Orthodox -- were attacked. Doctrinal uniformity,
too, could be enforced with sacred violence. When the US Attorney General defines
criticism of the Administration in wartime as treason, or when Congress enacts
legislation that justifies the erosion of civil liberties with appeals to patriotism,
they are enacting a Crusades script.

All of this is implicit in the word that President Bush first used, which came
to him as naturally as a baseball reference, to define the war on terrorism.
That such a dark, seething religious history of sacred violence remains largely
unspoken in our world does not defuse it as an explosive force in the human
unconscious. In the world of Islam, of course, its meaning could not be more
explicit, or closer to consciousness. The full historical and cultural significance
of "crusade" is instantly obvious, which is why a howl of protest
from the Middle East drove Bush into instant verbal retreat. Yet the very inadvertence
of his use of the word is the revelation: Americans do not know what fire they
are playing with. Osama bin Laden, however, knows all too well, and in his periodic
pronouncements, he uses the word "crusade" to this day, as a flamethrower.

Religious war is the danger here, and it is a graver one than Americans think.
Despite our much-vaunted separation of church and state, America has always
had a quasi-religious understanding of itself, reflected in the messianism of
Puritan founder John Winthrop, the Deist optimism of Thomas Jefferson, the embrace
of redemptive suffering that marked Abraham Lincoln and, for that matter, the
conviction of Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, that Communism
had to be opposed on a global scale if only because of its atheism. But never
before has America been brought deeper into a dynamite-wired holy of holies
than in our President's war on terrorism. Despite the post-Iraq toning down
of Washington's rhetoric of empire, and the rejection of further crusader references
-- although Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word this past March --
Bush's war openly remains a cosmic battle between nothing less than the transcendent
forces of good and evil. Such a battle is necessarily unlimited and open-ended,
and so justifies radical actions -- the abandonment, for example, of established
notions of civic justice at home and of traditional alliances abroad.

A cosmic moral-religious battle justifies, equally, risks of world-historic
proportioned disaster, since the ultimate outcome of such a conflict is to be
measured not by actual consequences on this earth but by the earth-transcending
will of God. Our war on terrorism, before it is anything else, is thus an imagined
conflict, taking place primarily in a mythic realm beyond history.

In waging such a "war," the enemy is to be engaged everywhere and
nowhere, not just because the actual nihilists who threaten the social order
are faceless and deracinated but because each fanatical suicide-bomber is only
an instance of the transcendent enemy -- and so the other face of us. Each terrorist
is, in effect, a sacrament of the larger reality, which is "terrorism."
Instead of perceiving unconnected centers of inhuman violence -- tribal warlords,
Mafia chieftains, nationalist fighters, xenophobic Luddites -- President Bush
projects the grandest and most interlocking strategies of conspiracy, belief
and organization. By the canonization of the war on terrorism, petty nihilists
are elevated to the status of world-historic warriors, exactly the fate they
might have wished for. This is why the conflict readily bleeds from one locus
to another -- Afghanistan then, Iraq now, Iran or some other land of evil soon -- and
why, for that matter, the targeted enemies are entirely interchangeable -- here
Osama bin Laden, there Saddam Hussein, here the leader of Iran, there of North
Korea. They are all essentially one enemy -- one "axis" -- despite
their differences from one another, or even hatred of one another.

Hard-boiled men and women who may not share Bush's fervent spirituality can
nonetheless support his purpose because, undergirding the new ideology, there
is an authentic global crisis that requires an urgent response. New technologies
are now making it possible for small groups of nihilists, or even single individuals,
to wreak havoc on a scale unprecedented in history. This is the ultimate "asymmetric
threat." The attacks of 9/11, amplified by the murderous echo of the anthrax
mailer, the as-yet-unapprehended psychopath who sent deadly letters to journalists
and government officials in the weeks after 9/11, put that new condition on
display for all the world to see. Innovations in physics, biology, chemistry
and information technology -- and soon, possibly, in nanotechnology and genetic
engineering -- have had the unforeseen effect of threatening to put in a few hands
the destructive power that, in former times, could be exercised only by sizable
armies. This is the real condition to which the Bush Administration is responding.
The problem is actual, if not yet fully present.

So, to put the best face on the Bush agenda (leaving aside questions of oil,
global market control and economic or military hegemony), a humane project of
antiproliferation can be seen at its core. Yet a nation that was trying to promote
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons,
would behave precisely as the Bush Administration has behaved over the past
three years. The Pentagon's chest-thumping concept of "full spectrum dominance"
itself motivates other nations to seek sources of countervailing power, and
when the United States actually goes to war to impose its widely disputed notion
of order on some states, but not others, nations -- friendly as well as unfriendly
-- find themselves with an urgent reason to acquire some means of deterring
such intervention.

The odd and tragic thing is that the world before Bush was actually nearing
consensus on how to manage the problem of the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, and had begun to put in place promising structures designed to
prevent such spread. Centrally embodied in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
of 1968, which had successfully and amazingly kept the number of nuclear powers,
actual as well as admitted, relatively low, that consensus gave primacy to treaty
obligations, international cooperation and a serious commitment by existing
nuclear powers to move toward ultimate nuclear abolition. All of that has been
trashed by Bush. "International law?" he smirked in December 2003.
"I better call my lawyer."

Now indications are that nations all over the globe -- Japan, Saudi Arabia,
Argentina, Brazil, Australia -- have begun re-evaluating their rejections of
nukes, and some are positively rushing to acquire them. Iran and North Korea
are likely to be only the tip of this radioactive iceberg. Nuclear-armed Pakistan
and India are a grim forecast of the future on every continent. And the Bush
Administration -- by declaring its own nuclear arsenal permanent, by threatening
nuclear first-strikes against other nations, by "warehousing" treaty-defused
warheads instead of destroying them, by developing a new line of "usable"
nukes, by moving to weaponize the "high frontier" of outer space,
by doing little to help Russia get rid of its rotting nuclear stockpile, by
embracing "preventive war" -- is enabling this trend instead of discouraging
it. How can this be?

The problem has its roots in a long-term American forgetfulness, going back
to the acid fog in which the United States ended World War II. There was never
a complete moral reckoning with the harsh momentum of that conflict's denouement
-- how American leaders embraced a strategy of terror bombing, slaughtering
whole urban populations, and how, finally, they ushered in the atomic age with
the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scholars have debated those questions,
but politicians have avoided them, and most citizens have pretended they aren't
really questions at all. America's enduring assumptions about its own moral
supremacy, its own altruism, its own exceptionalism, have hardly been punctured
by consideration of the possibility that we, too, are capable of grave mistakes,
terrible crimes. Such awareness, drawn from a fuller reckoning with days gone
by -- with August 6 and 9, 1945, above all -- would inhibit America's present
claim to moral grandeur, which is simultaneously a claim, of course, to economic
and political grandiosity. The indispensable nation must dispense with what
went before.

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner said. "It isn't even
past." How Americans remember their country's use of terror bombing affects
how they think of terrorism; how they remember the first use of nuclear weapons
has profound relevance for how the United States behaves in relation to nuclear
weapons today. If the long American embrace of nuclear "mutual assured
destruction" is unexamined; if the Pentagon's treaty-violating rejection
of the ideal of eventual nuclear abolition is unquestioned -- then the Bush Administration's
embrace of nukes as normal, usable weapons will not seem offensive.

Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny. The
Bush Administration is fully committed to maintaining what the historian Marc
Trachtenberg calls our "nuclear amnesia" even as the Administration
seeks to impose a unilateral structure of control on the world. As it pursues
a world-threatening campaign against other people's weapons of mass destruction,
that is, the Bush Administration refuses to confront the moral meaning of America's
own weapons of mass destruction, not to mention their viral character, as other
nations seek smaller versions of the American arsenal, if only to deter Bush's
next "preventive" war. The United States' own arsenal, in other words,
remains the primordial cause of the WMD plague.

"Memory," the novelist Paul Auster has written, is "the space
in which a thing happens for the second time." No one wants the terrible
events that came after the rising of the sun on September 11, 2001, to happen
for a second time except in the realm of remembrance, leading to understanding
and commitment. But all the ways George Bush exploited those events, betraying
the memory of those who died in them, must be lifted up and examined again,
so that the outrageousness of his political purpose can be felt in its fullness.
Exactly how the war on terrorism unfolded; how it bled into the wars against
Afghanistan, then Iraq; how American fears were exacerbated by Administration
alarms; how civil rights were undermined, treaties broken, alliances abandoned,
coarseness embraced -- none of this should be forgotten.

Given how they have been so dramatically unfulfilled, Washington's initial
hubristic impulses toward a new imperial dominance should not be forgotten.
That the first purpose of the war -- Osama "dead or alive" -- changed
when Al Qaeda proved elusive should not be forgotten. That the early justification
for the war against Iraq -- Saddam's weapons of mass destruction -- changed when
they proved nonexistent should not be forgotten. That in former times the US
government behaved as if facts mattered, as if evidence informed policy, should
not be forgotten. That Afghanistan and Iraq are a shambles, with thousands dead
and hundreds of thousands at risk from disease, disorder and despair, should
not be forgotten. That a now-disdainful world gave itself in unbridled love
to America on 9/11 should not be forgotten.

Nor, given Bush's reference, should the most relevant fact about the Crusades
be forgotten -- that, on their own terms and notwithstanding the romance of
history, they were, in the end, an overwhelming failure. The 1096 campaign,
the "First Crusade," finally "succeeded" in 1099, when a
remnant army fell upon Jerusalem, slaughtering much of its population. But armies
under Saladin reasserted Islamic control in 1187, and subsequent Crusades never
succeeded in re-establishing Latin dominance in the Holy Land. The reconquista
Crusades reclaimed Spain and Portugal for Christian Europe, but in the process
destroyed the glorious Iberian convivencia, a high civilization never
to be matched below the Pyrenees again.

Meanwhile, intra-Christian crusades, wars against heresy, only made permanent
the East-West split between Latin Catholicism and "schismatic" Eastern
Orthodoxy, and made inevitable the eventual break, in the Reformation, between
a Protestant north and a Catholic south. The Crusades, one could argue, established
basic structures of Western civilization, while undermining the possibility
that their grandest ideals would ever be realized.

Will such consequences -- new global structures of an American imperium, hollowed-out
hopes for a humane and just internationalism -- follow in the train of George
W. Bush's crusade? This question will be answered in smaller part by anonymous,
ad hoc armies of on-the-ground human beings in foreign lands, many of whom will
resist Washington to the death. In larger part, the question will be answered
by those privileged to be citizens of the United States. To us falls the ultimate
power over the American moral and political agenda. As has never been true of
any empire before, because this one is still a democracy, such power belongs
to citizens absolutely. If the power is ours, so is the responsibility.

This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.

The article is adapted from the introduction to Mr. Carroll's new book Crusade, Chronicles of an Unjust War (Metropolitan Books), a collection of his columns since September 11, 2001.

More Comments:

Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007

Al Qaeda DOES want a religious war, and Bush has charged head first and brain last in their traps.

Peter K. Clarke -
10/9/2007

The only "crusade" W has ever really cared about, since entering the White House 44 months ago, is getting legitimately elected to national office for the first time this coming November 2. For this selfish cause, this incompetent president is quite evidently willing to sacrifice American leadership in the world, American security at home and abroad, and American democracy.

The true turning point was not his umpteenth slip of tongue (in saying "crusade"), but his statement, about the same time, that a " 'war' on terrorism" would be thenceforth the defining theme of a presidency which until then was flailing around for a raison d'etre. Osama bin Laden, the semi-rational fanatic in a cave, had hoped to poke a couple of holes in the World Trade Center. An accident of building engineering, and shoddy ballots in Florida delivering to Washington possibly the most inept president in all American history, have instead turned a mass murderer into the symbolic leader of a never-ending global war, and given him victories beyond his dreams.

Dave Livingston -
1/7/2005

Islamists are typical bullys. They beat up on other people, but whine and complain when someone defends himself.

They are ignorant of history or they are indifferent to it, unless it advances their aganda. For instance, prior to the rise of Islam out of the Arabian desert in the 7th Century all of the Middle East and North Africa and much of Central Asia were Christian, the later evangelized by the Apostles Thomas, Jude & Bartholomew & later by Nestorian missionaires.

Reflections of early Christianity surviving lie in Ethiopia, largely Christian, in NE Africa, Lebanon, which even today regardless Syrian conquest remains 52% Catholic, largely Caldean Rite with its origins in the 1st Century, with healthy Orthodox & Assyria (Nestorian) communities as well. Iraq retains a Catholic, Caldean Rite, minority of 1%. Tariq Azizz, the former Iraqi Prime Minister is a Caldean Rite Christian. There are large Chaldean rite Catholic communities in the U.S., notably in Chicago.

In even Iran, despite vicious oppression, there remains a tiny, 25,000+, but vigorous Catholic community of Caldean rite Catholics. And in Syria too some 2% of the population remains Catholic, Maronite & Caldean rites. Too there scattered remanents of Orthodox Armenian & Nestorian Christians. In even Egypt, regardless severe oppression some 5% of the population remains Coptic Christian. In addition, in Egypt there is a struggling Catholic community of 272,000+ Catholics. There is even in the United Arab Emirates a surviving Catholic community of 336,000; Uzbekistan has a Catholic community of 3,000 and Tajiistan a Catholic community of some 2,000. Krgyzstan has a Catholic community of 30,000 surviving among a Sunni Moslem populsation of 4,900,000. Prior to Moslem conquest the Nestorian community was widespread in Central Asia and scattered Nestorian communities yet survive. Not to be forgotten, are the Turkish Christian communities, 32,000 Catholics, thousands of Orthodox & some Nestorians. Kuwait has a thriving Catholic community of 154,000, albeit only .8% of the Kuwaiti population.

According to soldiers who've served in Iraq & with whom I've spoken many Kurds remain Christian, but of course, history tells us Salidin was a Kurd (& no Christian.) :)

The source of most of my figures quoted above is the 2003 edition of "The Catholic Almanac."

The point of this

Dave Livingston -
1/7/2005

William Leckie left out two of the Pope's other rationales for the Crusades 1) diverting the self-destructive energies of European warlords from killing each other to putting their martial skills to use abroad rather than at home & 2) reopening a line of communications, severed by the rise of militant Islam, with the Sons of Thomas, the Christians of the Malabar Coast of India, first evangelized by old Doubting Thomas, who was a very aggressive and very effective evangelist, but one whose efforts are largely forgotten in the West. But that's no surprise, because his evangelizing took place in the East.

One misfortune of the Gulkf War was that a church in Iraq was destroyed in Iraq, a church, Caldean rite Catholic, that had been built in the early 7th Century on the site of a previous church built on that spot to recall the preaching there of the Apostle Thomas.

Dave Livingston -
1/7/2005

Carroll complains about allied bombing of German & Japanese cities, but what about Coventry, the London Blitz, the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, Uboats cutting off food supplies to the British Isles. It's called war. Throughout history civilian populations suffered during wars. That's why insurance companies have exclusions in many of their policies for acts of war. Generally collateral damage is a fact during most shooting wars.

Complaints about the two atomic bombs dropped upon Japan are a bit silly in light of the reality that the fire bombings of Toyio killed far more non-combatants than the two atomic bombs together.

Whimpering & whining that during the campaign in Iraq some civilians were accidently killed by our bombing simply ignores the central fact that wars are destructive and often kill accidentially (or deliberately on the parts of Germany & Japan & the U.S.S.R. during WWII)civilians as well as combatants. To complain about this is about as sensible as railing at the destructiveness of volcanic eruptions, but with the caveat we can & should strive to prevent wars.

chris l pettit -
9/22/2004

Maybe you should read them...

It is all illegal and atrocious...one wrong does not allow another...that is blatantly stated in the 4th Geneva Convention.

chris l pettit -
9/22/2004

Religion period is one of the root causes of intolerance and bigotry in the world today. Radical Muslims are good examples, as are dimwitted Christian extremists such as Mr. Livingston.

A friend suggested to me that we just let the extremists of the world kill themselves off. As a human rights advocate, I tend to be against it, but given the idiocy of the positions of Mr. Livingston and the other Christian extremists on this site and throughout the US, and other extremists in Israel, the Islamic world, and elsewhere makes it hard for those of us who actually recognize the paucity of organised religion and the fact that the human race is a single interconnected species that should emphasize its similarities instead of differences in order to achieve peace and the guarantee of human rights.

Dave...you are a disgrace to the fundamental teachings of your faith and all mankind

Hans Vought -
9/21/2004

To focus on one word (admittedly spoken spontaneously and afterwards acknowledged as a mistake), link it to one meaning of that word involving historical events, and then accuse the speaker of intending to literally attempt to reenact those events, is not sound reasoning. While I am not a big fan of the current foreign policy, I do think we should stick to factual criticisms and avoid partisan hysteria.

Let's consider the evidence: President Bush went out of his way, both in the weeks immediately following 9/11 and since, to make clear that the "War on Terror" was NOT a war on Islam, and to point out that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, both in the USA and abroad, are peace-loving. While some Arab Americans have been subject to more intense scrutiny, there have been no mass detentions as there were of German Americans in World War I and Japanese Americans in World War II. No attempt has been made by US armed forces to "re-Christianize" the Middle East. Indeed, troops stationed in the Middle East go out of their way to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities, much to the chagrin of female soldiers.

By insisting that Bush secretly intends to do what he is not doing (i.e., a Christian war on Islam), one only recruits more jihadists for Al Qaeda.

Ben H. Severance -
9/21/2004

Dave,

When you talk history or the Catholic church, I generally find myself in agreement, or at least receptive to new knowledge. This is refreshing, for you are much more than an angry Vietnam vet who hates Kerry. You are a Christian. Admittedly, a crazy Papist who has failed to see the liberating power of the Reformation, but a Christian nonetheless. Go in peace, serve the Lord.

Ben H. Severance -
9/21/2004

William . H. Leckie, Jr. -
9/21/2004

"A response far too long in coming to Islamic Aggression [sic]?"

Clap-trap. Pope Urban's 11th century call for a Crusade was shaped more by the dynamics of papal politics, the weaknesses of the Byzantines and, later, Venetian commercial ambition, and the need for an outlet for aggressive aristocrats; its caesaro-papal roots can be traced to the wars of extermination Charlemagne conducted against the Saxons. It was fed from below by chiliastic emotion on the part of the wretched masses of Europe which vented itself on the Jews (and, in the case of Louis IX of France, was financed by confiscatory levies on them, too).

David C Battle -
9/20/2004

All those lands of the Levant had previously been christian lands, syria, palestine, etc. The Crusades, therefore, were a response far too long in coming to Islamic Aggression. Most mosques in that area are now sitting on once-christian churches.

John H. Lederer -
9/20/2004

Gee, and I thought Eisnehower's memoirs, "Crusade in Europe" used the word as a synonym for " A vigorous concerted movement for a cause or against an abuse." or "a campaign"

Much as "Mothers Against Drunken Drivers" used the term "crusade" to connote a zealous legislative campaign.

But I am not so naive as to think this conflict does not have a religious connotation. It certainly did pre-9/11 when war against the West was declared a "jihad" and the motivations of the those who suicided in the attack was certainly religious.

So..is the author's point that the crusades of the 11-13th centuries were misguided and brutal (as were most military actions of that period) and therefore all crusades are? Does that include Eisenhower's? Or is it that "crusade" would wound the sensibilities of those who think they are part of a "jihad"? Or os the author somehow saying, as he sems to imply, that Bush meant a crusade against all moslems..and , seemingly, jews from the author's text?

I wonder what the author thinks of the two major military expansions of the moslem world? What would be his thoughts on Jean Parisot or Andrea Doria?

John H. Lederer -
9/20/2004

Gee, and I thought Eisnehower's memoirs, "Crusade in Europe" used the word as a synonym for " A vigorous concerted movement for a cause or against an abuse." or "a campaign"

Much as "Mothers Against Drunken Drivers" used the term "crusade" to connote a zealous legislative campaign.

But I am not so naive as to think this conflict does not have a religious connotation. It certainly did pre-9/11 when war against the West was declared a "jihad" and the motivations of the those who suicided in the attack was certainly religious.

So..is the author's point that the crusades of the 11-13th centuries were misguided and brutal (as were most military actions of that period) and therefore all crusades are? Does that include Eisenhower's? Or is it that "crusade" would wound the sensibilities of those who think they are part of a "jihad"? Or os the author somehow saying, as he sems to imply, that Bush meant a crusade against all moslems..and , seemingly, jews from the author's text?

I wonder what the author thinks of the two major military expansions of the moslem world? What would be his thoughts on Jean Parisot or Andrea Doria?